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Thursday, 24 December 2015

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - The Final Day - My best reads for 2015

Two days ago I spoke
of “Mirages of the Mind” not featuring on many highlight lists for 2015, and
the story continues, my favourite translated book for 2015 has had scant
attention when the lists of others are perused. Why? I have no idea. As a lover
of art, literature that pushes boundaries, books that demand to be read, books
that change your mood, force you to become aware of your surroundings, think of
your roller-coaster of emotions. This novel has it all, and yes I may be an
unashamed Enrique Vila-Matas fan, that doesn’t mean I over rate his works (for
example his other book released this year, in English, “A Brief History of
Portable Literature” didn’t make it onto my top 12 list so I’m not extremely
biased).

Every
five years in Kassel, Germany, the documenta exhibition of modern and
contemporary art takes place. The concept came to life in 1955 as an attempt to
bring post-war Germany up to speed with modern art, after the banishment and
repression of the cultural fringe during the Second World War. In 2012
dOCUMENTA 13 had Carolyn Christov-Bajargiev as the artistic director and
curator and was based on the theme “Collapse and Recovery”.

As part
of the dOCUMENTA13 exhibition a number of writers were invited to participate
as “writers in residence” where they were housed in a Chinese restaurant, so
customers and staff could watch them “write’, observe them “creating”.

Our book
“The Illogic of Kassel” opens with our author, and protagonist, Enrique
Vila-Matas, being invited out to dinner by a Maria Boston, dinner is something
he never does, to meet an Irish couple the McGuffins. But a McGuffin is a trap,
something to hook the reader (or viewer of a film) in, a devise which has
little to do with the plot, but allows the story to advance. Of course
Vila-Matas is aware of the trap, however he attends the dinner anyway:

My
inveterate habit of writing a chronicle every time I get invited to a strange
place to do something weird (over time I've realized that all places actually
seem strange to me), I had the impression I was once again living through the
beginning of a journey that could end up turning into a written tale, in which,
as was customary, I would combine perplexity and my suspended life to describe
the world as an absurd place arrived at by way of a very extravagant invitation.

We are
about to enter Enrique Vila-Matas’ journey to Kassel and his role in dOCUMENTA
13 as a writer in residence at the Dschingis Khan Chinese restaurant on the
outskirts of Kassel. He is to be an avant-garde instillation in a leading
avant-garde event. Immediately I am online, researching dOCUMENTA 13, and
in fact Enrique Vila-Matas was a participant, a “writer in residence”, this is
autobiography, but as readers of Vila-Matas would know it is also fiction, the
world where homage to literature is always hovering on the outskirts, where the
act of creation is central to the theme. As the event draws closer we see
Vila-Matas’ anxiety and uncertainty increase:

Climbing
into my taxi with my suitcase as quickly as possible, I looked like I was
skipping town. Maybe I was the only citizen who was leaving. I was sure there
was more to life than the nation; after all, I was travelling to the very
center of the contemporary avant-garde, I was going to Kassel, via Frankfurt,
probably to look for the mystery of the universe and to be initiated into the
poetry of an unknown algebra, and also to try and find an oblique clock and a
Chinese restaurant and, of course, to try and find a home along the way.

Whilst
this work could be seen as a collection of our writer’s journals and
experiences, or even a tour through the exhibition itself, it is so much more.
The depth of art meditation, the looping of life affirming moments through
repetition on the theme of “collapse and recovery”, the definition of ones own
space. Before commencing his “writer in residence” engagement our narrator
takes in a number of performances as dOCUMENTA 13, including “Study for
Strings” held on the same train platform where Jews were shipped to
concentration camps.

I
observed that for the first time in my whole life it wasn’t fun to feel as
though I were inside someone else’s novel, in this case a book by Robert
Walser. Although it was poetic to think that, as inThe Walk, it was late and
everything was getting dark, it nevertheless seemed more appropriate for this
to be experienced by whoever wrote it, in other words by Walser, and not me.
And yet it was unsettling to see that what was happening to me was exactly what
happened to the happy narrator in that book: it got dark, and I suddenly
thought it better to stop walking. Usually I was already at home when darkness
fell, so it followed that my melancholy there in Kassel was in fact similar to
Walser’s.

Vila-Matas
is well known for his extensive references to other writers, to other bodies of
literature, in his novel “Dublinesque”our
protagonist is Riba, a failed publisher who arranges for three writers to
accompany him to Dublin, where on Bloomsday he plans a funeral for the
Gutenberg era, in the same cemetery where Paddy Dignam was buried in James
Joyce’s “Ulysses”. The death of the Guttenberg age being the demise of print,
the rise of the digital era and the death of “true” readers.

“The
Illogic of Kassel” also features numerous references to other writers, to other
works as well as including interpretation on the avant-garde works he views
during his time in Kassel. His conversations, meetings, slow walks, all give
Vila-Matas the room to ruminate on art and life and literature:

We
talked about the difficulty Spaniards had accepting art without a message,
accepting literature without the necessarily humanist touch or a communist
dimension. Spanish realist literature, Chus said, was pre-Manet, that’s why
she’d left the country, really, she couldn’t take it anymore; the economic
crisis had served as an excuse to revive the same old, early twentieth-century
naturalism. What obstinacy, insisting on reproducing what already exists!

As we
follow Vila-Matas through his time in Kassel, his mood changes from joyous in
the mornings and dark and drained in the evenings to a fully joyous state. The
vivid descriptions and his shift in moods, due to simple things like a walk, or
the catch of the breeze on his neck, or observing a pile of compost installed
as art, immerse the reader in his world. You become a traveller with the
writer, as I recently debated on Twitter, this is a book which demands to be
read in open spaces, in unexplored spaces, in new realms, and you cannot help
but be pulled by the writer’s magnetism into a different space yourself.
As our writer becomes one with Kassel, he ends up with a conundrum; “to
get out of Europe I would have to get out of the forest, but to get out of the
forest I’d have to get out of Europe”, although a citizen of Europe he’s
trapped.

His
engagement also includes a lecture booking, a talk to no-one, so besides
grappling with the concept of turning up to a Chinese restaurant everyday to
write and be observed, he also juggles the concept of having to give a lecture,
to nobody, but about what?

This is
another wonderful celebration of the written word by Vila-Matas, where the
lines between fiction, realism and avant-garde are constantly blurred, where
fantasy and reality are presented to alter the reader’s moods. A writer where
you could simply explore all the links to other writers and be kept busy for
years on end, homage to literature and the art of writing:

I
remembered Chesterton said that there was one thing that gave radiance to
everything. It was the idea of something around the corner. Perhaps it is this
desire for something more that propels us to seek the new, to believe something
exists that can still be distinct, unseen, special, something different, around
the most unexpected corner; that’s what some of us have spent our whole lives
wanting to be avant-garde, because it is our way of believing that in the
world, or maybe beyond it,out
beyond the poor world, there might be something we’ve never seen before.
And because of this, some of us reject the repetition of what has been done
before; we hate them telling us the same as always, trying to make us know
things all over again that we know so much about already; we loath the realist
and the rustic, or the rustic and the realist, who think the task of the writer
is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if in its chaotic evolution, it
monstrous complexity, reality could be capture and narrated. We are amazed by
writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, the closer
they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further
that takes you away from reality; we curse those who prefer to ignore risk,
just because they are afraid of loneliness and getting it wrong; we scorn those
who don’t understand that the greatness of a writer lies in his promise,
guaranteed in advance, of failure; we love those who swear that art lies solely
in this attempt.

In my
mind a certain contender of the new Man Booker International Prize and the US
based Best Translated Book Award.